by Ouida
If Mephistopheles had been by to tempt me, I would have sold my soul to have wreaked vengeance on them both. Neither saw me, thank Heaven! and I had self-possession enough not to give them the cruel triumph of witnessing my anguish. I withdrew in silence, dropped the curtain, and rushed to bury my wrongs and sorrows in the friendly bosom of the gentle night. It was my first love, and I had made a fool of myself. The two are synonymous.
How I reached the barracks I never knew. All the night long I sat watching the stars out, raving to them of Eudoxia Adelaida, and cursing in plentiful anathemas my late Orestes. How should I bear his impudent grin every mortal night of my life across the mess-table? I tore up into shreds about a ream of paper, inscribed with tender sonnets to my faithless idol. I trampled into fifty thousand shreds a rosette off her dress, for which, fool-like, I had begged the day before. I smashed the looking-glass, which could only show me the image of a pitiful donkey. I called on Heaven to redress my wrongs. Oh! curse it! never was a fellow at once so utterly done for and so utterly done brown!
And in the vicarage, as I learnt afterwards, when my letter was received at home, there was great glorification and pleasure. My mother and the girls were enraptured at the high society darling Gussy was moving in; “but then, you know, mamma, dear Gussy’s manners are so gentle, so gentleman-like, they are sure to please wherever he goes!” Wherewith my mother cried, and dried her eyes, and cried again, over that abominable letter copied from Little Grand’s, and smelling of vilest tobacco.
Then entered a rectoress of a neighboring parish, to whom my mother and the girls related with innocent exultation of my grand friends at Malta; how Lord A. Fitzhervey was my sworn ally, and the Marchioness St. Julian had quite taken me under her wing. And the rectoress, having a son of her own, who was not doing anything so grand at Cambridge, but principally sotting beer at a Cherryhinton public, smiled and was wrathful, and said to her lord at dinner:
“My dear, did you ever hear of a Marchioness St. Julian?”
“No, my love, I believe not — never.”
“Is there one in the peerage?”
“Can’t say, my dear. Look in Burke.”
So the rectoress got Burke and closed it, after deliberate inspection, with malignant satisfaction.
“I thought not. How ridiculous those St. Johns are about that ugly boy Augustus. As if Tom were not worth a hundred of him!”
I was too occupied with my own miseries then to think about Conran and Lucrezia, though some time after I heard all about it. It seems, that, a year before, Conran was on leave in Rome, and at Rome, loitering about the Campagna one day, he made a chance acquaintance with an Italian girl, by getting some flowers for her she had tried to reach and could not. She was young, enthusiastic, intensely interesting, and had only an old Roman nurse, deaf as a post and purblind, with her. The girl was Lucrezia da Guari, and Lucrezia was lovely as one of her own myrtle or orange flowers. Somehow or other Conran went there the next day, and the next, and the next, and so on for a good many days, and always found Lucrezia. Now, Conran had at bottom a touch of unstirred romance, and, moreover, his own idea of what sort of woman he could love. Something in this untrained yet winning Campagna flower answered to both. He was old to trust his own discernment, and, after a month or two’s walks and talks, Conran, one of the proudest men going, offered himself and his name to a Roman girl of whom he knew nothing, except that she seemed to care for him as he had had a fancy to be cared for all his life. It was a deucedly romantic thing — however, he did it! Lucrezia had told him her father was a military officer, but somehow or other this father never came to light, and when he called at their house — or rather rooms — Conran always found him out, which he thought queer, but, on the whole, rather providential, and he set the accident down to a foreigner’s roaming habits.
The day Conran had really gone the length of offering to make an unknown Italian his wife, he went, for the first time in the evening, to Da Guari’s house. The servant showed him in unannounced to a brightly-lighted chamber, reeking with wine and smoke, where a dozen men were playing trente et quarante at an amateur bank, and two or three others were gathered round what he had believed his own fair and pure Campagna flower. He understood it all; he turned away with a curse upon him. He wanted love and innocence; adventuresses he could have by the score, and he was sick to death of them. From that hour he never saw her again till he met her at the Casa di Fiori.
The next day I went to Conran while he was breakfasting, and unburdened my mind to him. He looked ill and haggard, but he listened to me very kindly, though he spoke of the people at the Casa di Fiori in a hard, brief, curious manner.
“Plenty have been taken in like you, Gus,” he said “I was, years ago, in my youth, when I joined the Army. There are scores of such women, as I told you, down the line of the Pacific, and about here; anywhere, in fact, where the army and navy give them fresh pigeons to be gulled. They take titles that sound grand in boys’ ears, and fascinate them till they’ve won all their money, and then — send them to the dogs. Your Marchioness St. Julian’s real name is Sarah Briggs.”
I gave an involuntary shriek. Sarah Briggs finished me. It was the death-stroke, that could never be got over.
“She was a ballet-girl in London,” continued Conran; “then, when she was sixteen, married that Fitzhervey, alias Briggs, alias Smith, alias what you please, and set up in her present more lucrative employment with her three or four confederates. Saint-Jeu was expelled from Paris for keeping a hell in the Chaussée d’Antin, Fitzhervey was a leg at Newmarket, Orangia Magnolia a lawyer’s clerk, who was had up for forgery, Guatamara is — by another name — a scoundrel of Rome. There is the history of your Maltese Peerage, Gussy. Well, you’ll be wider awake next time. Wait, there is somebody at my door. Stay here a moment, I’ll come back to you.”
Accordingly, I stayed in his bedroom, where I had found him writing, and he went into his sitting-room, of which, from the diminutiveness of his domicile, I commanded a full view, sit where I would. What was my astonishment to see Lucrezia! I went to his bedroom door; it was locked from the outside, so I perforce remained where I was, to, nolens volens, witness the finish of last night’s interview.
Stern to the last extent and deadly pale, Conran stood, too surprised to speak, and most probably at a loss for words.
Lucrezia came up to him nevertheless with the abandonment of youth and southern blood.
“Victor! Victor! let me speak to you. You shall listen; you shall not judge me unheard.”
“Signorina, I have judged you by only too ample evidence.”
He had recovered himself now, and was as cool as needs be.
“I deny it. But you love me still?”
“Love you? More shame on me! A laugh, a compliment, a caress, a cashmere, is as much as such women as you are worth. Love becomes ridiculous named in the same breath with you.”
She caught hold of his hand and crushed it in both her own.
“Kill me you will. Death would have no sting from your hand, but never speak such words to me.”
His voice trembled.
“How can I choose but speak them? You know that I believed you in Italy, and how on that belief I offered you my name — a name never yet stained, never yet held unworthy. I lost you, to find you in society which stamped you for ever. A lovely fiend, holding raw boys enchained, that your associates might rifle their purses with marked cards and cogged dice. I hoped to have found a diamond, without spot or flaw. I discovered my error too late; it was only glass, which all men were free to pick up and trample on at their pleasure.”
He tried to wrench his hand away, but she would not let it go.
“Hush! hush! listen to me first. If you once thought me worthy of your love, you may, surely, now accord me pity. I shall not trouble you long. After this, you need see me no more. I am going back to my old convent. You and the world will soon forget me, but I shall remember you, and pray for you, as dearer than my own soul.”
Conran’s head was bent down now, and his voice was thick, as he answered briefly,
“Go on.”
This scene half consoled me for Eudoxia Adelaida — (I mean, O Heavens, Sarah Briggs!) — it was so exquisitely romantic, and Conran and Lucrezia wouldn’t have done at all badly for Monte Cristo and that dear little Haidee. I was fearfully poetic in those days.
“When I met you in Rome,” Lucrezia went on, in obedience to his injunction, “two years ago, you remember I had only left my convent and lived with my father but a month or two. I told you he was an officer. I only said what I had been told, and I knew no more than you that he was the keeper of a gambling house.”
She shuddered as she paused, and leaned her forehead on Conran’s hand. He did not repulse her, and she continued, in her broken, simple English:
“The evening you promised me what I should have needed to have been an angel to be worthy of — your love and your name — that very evening, when I reached home, my father bade me dress for a soirée he was going to give. I obeyed him, of course. I knew nothing but what he told me, and I went down, to find a dozen young nobles and a few Englishmen drinking and playing on a table covered with green cloth. Some few of them came up to me, but I felt frightened; their looks, their tones, their florid compliments, were so different to yours. But my father kept his eye on me, and would not let me leave. While they were leaning over my chair, and whispering in my ear, you came to the door of the salon, and I went towards you, and you looked cold, and harsh, as I had never seen you before, and put me aside, and turned away without a word. Oh, Victor! why did you not kill me then? Death would have been kindness. Your Othello was kinder to Desdemona; he slew her — he did not leave her. From that hour I never saw you, and from that hour my father persecuted me because I would never join in his schemes, nor enter his vile gaming-rooms. Yet I have lived with him, because I could not get away. I have been too carefully watched. We Italians are not free, like your happy English girls. A few weeks ago we were compelled to leave Rome, the young Contino di Firenze had been stilettoed leaving my father’s rooms, and he could stay in Italy no longer. We came here, and joined that hateful woman, who calls herself Marchioness St. Julian; and, because she could not bend me to her will, gives out that I am her niece, and mad! I wonder I am not mad, Victor. I wish hearts would break, as the romancers make them; but how long one suffers and lives on! Oh, my love, my soul, my life, only say that you believe me, and look kindly at me once again, then I will never trouble you again, I will only pray for you. But believe me, Victor. The Mother Superior of my convent will tell you it is the truth that I speak. Oh, for the love of Heaven, believe me! Believe me or I shall die!”
It was not in the nature of man to resist her; there was truth in the girl’s voice and face, if ever truth walked abroad on earth. And Conran did believe her, and told her so in a few unconnected words, lifting her up in his arms, and vowing, with most unrighteous oaths, that her father should never have power to persecute her again as long as he himself lived to shelter and take care of her.
I was so interested in my Monte Cristo and Haidee (it was so like a chapter out of a book), that I entirely forgot my durance vile, and my novel and excessively disgraceful, though enforced, occupation of spy; and there I stayed, alternating between my interest in them and my agonies at the revelations concerning my Eudoxia Adelaida — oh, hang it! I mean Sarah Briggs — till, after a most confounded long time, Conran saw fit to take Lucrezia off, to get asylum for her with the Colonel’s wife for a day or two, that “those fools might not misconstrue her.” By which comprehensive epithet he, I suppose, politely designated “Ours.”
Then I went my ways to my own room, and there I found a scented, mauve-hued, creamy billet-doux, in uncommon bad handwriting, though, from my miserable Eudoxia Adelaida to the “friend and lover of her soul.” Confound the woman! — how I swore at that daintily-perfumed and most vilely-scrawled letter. To think that where that beautiful signature stretched from one side to the other— “Eudoxia Adelaida St. Julian” — there ought to have been that short, vile, low-bred, hideous, Billingsgate cognomen of “Sarah Briggs!”
In the note she reproached me — the wretched hypocrite! — for my departure the previous night, “without one farewell to your Eudoxia, O cruel Augustus!” and asked me to give her a rendezvous at some vineyards lying a little way off the Casa di Fiori, on the road to Melita. Now, being a foolish boy, and regarding myself as having been loved and wronged, whereas I had only been playing the very common rôle of pigeon, I could not resist the temptation of going, just to take one last look of that fair, cruel face, and upbraid her with being the first to sow the fatal seeds of lifelong mistrust and misery in my only too fond and faithful, &c. &c. &c.
So, at the appointed hour, just when the sun was setting over the far-away Spanish shore, and the hush of night was sinking over the little, rocky, peppery, military-thick, Mediterranean isle, I found myself en route to the vineyards; which, till I came to Malta, had been one of my delusions, Idea picturing them in wreaths and avenues, Reality proving them hop-sticks and parched earth. I drew near; it was quite dark now, the sun had gone to sleep under the blue waves, and the moon was not yet up. Though I knew she was Sarah Briggs, and an adventuress who had made game of me, two facts that one would fancy might chill the passion out of anybody, so mad was I about that woman, that, if I had met her then and there, I should have let her wheedle me over, and gone back to the Casa di Fiori with her and been fleeced again: I am sure I should, sir, and so would you, if, at eighteen, new to life, you had fallen in with Eudox —— pshaw! — with Sarah Briggs, my Marchioness St Julian.
I drew near the vineyards: my heart beat thick, I could not see, but I was certain I heard the rustle of her dress, caught the perfume of her hair. All her sins vanished: how could I upbraid her, though she were three times over Sarah Briggs? Yes, she was coming; I felt her near; an electric thrill rushed through me as soul met soul. I heard a murmured “Dearest, sweetest!” I felt the warm clasp of two arms, but — a cold row of undress waistcoat-buttons came against my face, and a voice I knew too well cried out, as I rebounded from him, impelled thereto by a not gentle kick, —
“The devil! get out! Who the deuce are you?”
We both stopped for breath. At that minute up rose the silver moon, and in its tell-tale rays we glared on one another, I and Little Grand.
That silence was sublime: the pause between Beethoven’s andante allegro — the second before the Spanish bull rushes upon the torreador.
“You little miserable wretch!” burst out Grand, slowly and terribly; “you little, mean, sneaking, spying, contemptible milksop! I should like to know what you mean by bringing out your ugly phiz at this hour, when you used to be afraid of stirring out for fear of nurse’s bogies? And to dare to come lurking after me!”
“After you, Mr. Grandison!” I repeated, with grandiloquence. “Really you put too much importance on your own movements. I came by appointment to meet the Marchioness St. Julian, whom, I presume, as you are well acquainted with her, you know in her real name of Sarah Briggs, and to — —”
“Sarah Briggs! — you come by appointment?” stammered Little Grand.
“Yes, sir; if you disbelieve my word of honor, I will condescend to show you my invitation.”
“You little ape!” swore Grand, coming back to his previous wrath; “it is a lie, a most abominable, unwarrantable lie! I came by appointment, sir; you did no such thing. Look there!”
And he flaunted before my eyes in the moonlight the fac-simile of my letter, verbatim copy, save that in his Cosmo was put in the stead of Augustus.
“Look there!” said I, giving him mine.
Little Grand snatched it, read it over once, twice, thrice, then drooped his head, with a burning color in his face, and was silent.
The “knowing hand” was done!
We were both of us uncommonly quiet for ten minutes, neither of us liked to be the first to
give in.
At last Little Grand looked up and held out his hand, no more nonsense about him now.
“Simon, you and I have been two great fools; we can’t chaff one another. She’s a cursed actress, and — let’s make it up, old boy.”
We made it up accordingly — when Little Grand was not conceited he was a very jolly fellow — and then I gave him my whole key to the mysteries, intricacies, and charms of our Casa di Fiori. We could not chaff one another, but poor Little Grand was pitiably sore then, and for long afterwards. He, the “old bird,” the cool hand, the sharp one of Ours, to have been done brown, to be the joke of the mess, the laugh of all the men, down to the weest drummer-boy! Poor Little Grand! He was too done up to swagger, too thoroughly angry with himself to swear at anybody else. He only whispered to me, “Why the dickens could she want you and me to meet our selves?”
“To give us a finishing hoax, I suppose,” I suggested.
Little Grand drew his cap over his eyes, and hung his head down in abject humiliation.
“I suppose so. What fools we have been, Simon! And, I say, I’ve borrowed three hundred of old Miraflores, and it’s all gone up at that devilish Casa; and how I shall get it from the governor, Heaven knows, for I don’t.”
“I’m in the same pickle, Grand,” I groaned. “I’ve given that old rascal notes of hand for two hundred pounds, and, if it don’t drop from the clouds, I shall never pay it. Oh, I say, Grand, love comes deucedly expensive.”